Image enhancement processing generally refers to techniques that enhance an image or a video. Image enhancement in image and video technology enables an improvement of a low resolution image or a low resolution video to, respectively, an enhanced image or an enhanced video. By way of example, a television may use an enhancement technique to modify a standard definition video sequence to an enhanced video sequence. Similarly, an image or video taken with a low resolution imaging device, such as a mobile phone, may be an enhanced image or video, respectively. In addition, the enhancement technique may include noise reduction.
Many enhancement techniques use two processing stages. The first stage includes multiple low-resolution images being registered with an image processing system, where one of the low-resolution images is selected as a primary image, and horizontal and vertical displacements of the rest of the low-resolution images (i.e., secondary images) are computed with respect to the primary image. The second stage includes the registered images being combined together to create an enhanced resolution image using the displacement information and aliasing information present in the low resolution images. This technique may be extended to a series of images of a video sequence for a video. Unfortunately, the resulting video sequence tends to have artifacts from the various components of the enhancement technique.
The foregoing and other objectives, features, and advantages of the invention may be more readily understood upon consideration of the following detailed description of the invention, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.